Mary Ann Evans, known by the pen name George 
Eliot (22 November 1819 - 22 December 1880), was an English
novelist. Born on a farm near Nuneaton in Warwickshire, she wrote 
about life in country towns in many of her novels. She used a male 
pen name, she said, to ensure that her works were taken seriously. 
Female authors published freely under their own names, but Eliot 
wanted to ensure that she was not seen as a writer of romances. 
An additional factor may have been a desire to shield her private 
life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her 
relationship with George Lewes.

Biography

Mary Ann Evans was the daughter of an estate agent in Warwickshire. 
She was brought up with a narrowly low church religion. Charles Bray, 
a Coventry manufacturer, brought her into contact with more liberal 
theologies. She translated Strauss's Life of Jesus (1846) and began 
contributing to the Westminster Review in 1850 and became its 
assistant editor in 1851. The Westminster Review had been founded by 
John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham and was the leading journal for 
philosophical radicals. In 1854, she published a translation of 
Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, and it was at that time that she 
began to live with George Henry Lewes in an extramarital cohabitation.

In 1857, she published "Amos Barton," the first of the "Scenes of 
Clerical Life" in Blackwood's Magazine. The collected "Scenes" were 
well received and launched Evans on a novelistic career. Evans's 
cohabitation with Lewes was a scandalous matter. Lewes's wife refused 
to be divorced, and so he remained married to her in name only, while 
he made house solely with Evans.

Two years after the death of Lewes, on May 6, 1880 she married a friend, 
John Cross, an American banker, who was 20 years her junior. They 
honeymooned in Venice and, allegedly, Cross jumped from their hotel 
balcony into the Grand Canal on their wedding night; he survived. She 
died at the age of 61 in London of a kidney ailment and was interred 
in Highgate Cemetery (East), Highgate, London.

Friend and author Henry James once wrote of her:

    She had a low forehead, a dull grey eye, a vast pendulous nose, a 
    huge mouth full of uneven teeth and a chin and jawbone qui n'en 
    finissent pas... Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful 
    beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the 
    mind, so that you end, as I ended, in falling in love with her. Yes 
    behold me in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking.
    
Literary assessment

Eliot's most famous work, Middlemarch, is a turning point in the history 
of the novel. Making masterful use of a counterpointed plot, Eliot 
presents the stories of a number of denizens of a small English town on 
the eve of the Reform Bill of 1832. The main characters, Dorothea Brooke 
and Tertius Lydgate, each long for exceptional lives but are powerfully 
constrained by their own unrealistic expectations as well as conservative 
society. The novel is notable for its deep psychological insight and 
sophisticated character portraits.

Throughout her career, Eliot wrote with a politically astute pen. From 
Adam Bede to Mill on the Floss and the frequently-read Silas Marner, Eliot 
presented the cases of social outsiders and small town persecution of that 
which they consider alien. No author since Jane Austen had been as sharp 
in pointing out the hypocrisy of the country squires and socially conscious. 
Felix Holt, the Radical and The Legend of Jubal were overtly political 
novels, and political crisis is at the heart of Middlemarch. By the time of 
Daniel Deronda, Eliot's sales were falling off, and she faded from public 
view to some degree.

As an author, Eliot was not only very successful in sales, but she was, and 
remains, one of the most widely praised for her style and clarity of thought. 
Eliot's sentence structures are clear, patient, and well balanced, and she 
mixes plain statement and unsettling irony with rare poise. Her commentaries 
are never without sympathy for the characters, and she never stoops to being 
arch or flip with the emotions in her stories. Villains and heroines and 
bystanders are all presented with awareness and full motivation.


Select bibliography

    * Scenes of Clerical Life (1858)
    * Adam Bede (1859)
    * The Lifted Veil (1859)
    * The Mill on the Floss (1860)
    * Silas Marner (1861)
    * Romola (1863)
    * Brother Jacob (1864)
    * Felix Holt, the Radical (1866)
    * The Spanish Gypsy (1868)
    * Agatha (1869)
    * Brother and Sister (1869)
    * The Legend of Jubal (1870)
    * Armgart (1871)
    * Middlemarch (1871)
    * Arion (1874)
    * A Minor Prophet (1874)
    * Stradivarius (1874)
    * Daniel Deronda (1876)
    * A College Breakfast Party (1879)
    * The Death of Moses (1879)
    * Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879)
    * Early Essays (1919)

She also wrote a considerable amount of fine poetry. (Collected Poems - ISBN 1871438403)